---
title: "Stuxnet was awesome, right?"
date: 2012-06-04T12:00:00-07:00
url: https://blog.lmorchard.com/2012/06/04/stuxnet-was-awesome-right/
author: Les Orchard
tags: [fiction, flashfiction, NaFicWriMo, scifi, stuxnet]
---

# Stuxnet was awesome, right?

<div>
  <p>
    The toaster wouldn’t toast, and the microwave wouldn’t—umm—make tiny heat waves, or whatever it does. The fridge, though, the fridge had slow-cooked everything inside overnight and the apartment stank like delicious death.
  </p>
  
  <p>
    <!--more-->
  </p>
  
  <p>
    Though, what had woken me up this morning was my phone on the night stand. Rather than my alarm going off at the usual time, it started at 5:30am by repeatedly redialing a pizza place a few time zones East and putting it on speaker. They were getting kind of upset with me, but I couldn’t quite speak English yet on account of the coffee machine refusing to produce anything but high-pressure jets of boiling water aimed at my torso.
  </p>
  
  <p>
    I finally managed to get the TV going. In-between bouts fighting to keep it on a news channel instead of the EWTN Global Catholic Network, I pieced together that we were at war. Sometime last night, we’d launched a cyber-salvo toward Asia. But, it had backfired: It turns out most of the embedded network processors in our stuff came from there in the first place.
  </p>
</div>